The Importance of Documenting Open Source Projects

Why to Document?

Documenting is important because it allows for your readers to understand how to use your project and in general provide useful information relating to it. This week I was documenting my Ruby lib functions on Github. Usually documentation in Github are in .md file format, which is a MarkDown language. I have heard before about markdown as most open source softwares contains at least one of them. Markdown is very easy to learn and there are useful tutorials and even online editors on how to get started with it.

Online Markdown Editors!

This week a class mate of mine have contributed to my project, special thanks to Sean Prashad. Documenting and writing comments to your code is the start of creating a great project, because think about it, if you don’t document anything, how could someone else understand it, how will YOU understand it if you come back to it after a long duration of time without seeing any instructions or guides on it. Therefore, Always document your source!